James P Mayfield, 5822175 Holly Oak Ln, Lewes, DE 19958

2002019, Dec 19, 2002

Apr 12, 2002

10/121525

J. Paul McNamee - Ellicott City MD, US
James Mayfield - Silver Spring MD, US
Martin Hall - Sykesville MD, US
Lien Duong - Ellicott City MD, US
Christine Piatko - Columbia MD, US

G06F007/00

707/002000

A web crawler identifies and characterizes an expression of a topic of general interest (such as cryptography) entered and generates an affinity set which comprises a set of related words. This affinity set is related to the expression of a topic of general interest. Using a common search engine, seed documents are found. The seed documents along with the affinity set and other search data will provide training to a classifier to create classifier output for the web crawler to search the web based on multiple criteria, including a content-based rating provided by the trained classifier. The web crawler can perform it's search topic focused, rather than “link” focused. The found relevant content will be ranked and results displayed or saved for a specialty search.

2004009, May 20, 2004

Aug 28, 2003

10/469445

James Mayfield - Silver Spring MD, US
J. McNamee - Ellicott City MD, US

G06F017/30

707/003000

A method and apparatus for identifying important terms in a sample text. A frequency of occurrence of terms in (sample frequency) is compared to a frequency of occurrence of those terms in a reference text (reference frequency). Terms occurring with higher frequency in the sample text than in the reference text are considered important to the sample text. A difference between the respective sample and reference frequencies of a term may be used to determine an importance score. Terms can be ranked and/or added to an affinity set as a function of importance score or rank. When there are insufficient terms for determining a sample frequency, those terms may be used in a search query to identify documents for use as sample text to determine sample frequencies. The important terms may be used for document summarization, query refinement, cross-language translation, and cross-language query expansion.

2005007, Mar 31, 2005

Feb 27, 2002

10/471483

James Mayfield - Silver Spring MD, US
Christine Piatko - Columbia MD, US
J McNamee - Ellicott City MD, US

G06F007/00

707005000

A method for determining term senses by identifying terms having multiple “senses” or meanings. For a given source term and trigger term, a list of important terms having high relevance to a combination of the source term and trigger term is created. The list of important terms is determined to be a “sense” for the source term in accordance with the present invention. A sense is assigned to a given term of a given document by determining similarity of the document to one or more senses and assigning a sense as a function of the degree of similarity. A sense-indicative index is created to treat multiple occurrences of a term distinctly, as a function of each respective assigned sense. Accordingly, the index may be used for sense-relevant information retrieval when a sense of a query term is discernible or specified.